Thursday, August 22, 2002

Leaders of the military dictatorship that took control of Argentina in 1976 believed that the Ford administration supported their crackdown on leftist insurgents and would not penalize them for rights abuses, newly declassified State Department documents show....

Repeatedly, senior Argentine officials brushed aside concerns raised by embassy officials, saying that Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger and other top Ford administration officials supported their war against Communists and were not deeply worried about rights abuses, several documents show....

Indeed, Mr. Guzzetti [Argentine foreign minister] suggested that Mr. Kissinger supported what the Argentine government called its war on terrorism and was encouraging President Jorge Rafael Videla of Argentina to move swiftly in crushing the insurgency.

This should not come as a surprise to anyone, especially after what just happened in Venezuala, but there is something especially chilling about the the careless conflation of "communists" and "terrorists."